I don’t think I’ve read it this century. I definitely forgot a lot.

Yeah, there are some moments in that book that are frighteningly on the nose for having been written several years in advance!

Finished listening to the Oxford Time travelers. Glad I did it! I had never read any of them as a series before. Pretty much read them more or less as they came out - Firewatch in some Year’s Best anthology, and it made enough of an impression on me that Connie Willis was a name I looked for in libraries and used bookstores. Which is how I got Doomsday Book. To Say Nothing of the Dog I think I actually have a hardback copy lying around somewhere. And Blackout/All Clear I read when it was nominated for a Hugo (I think I voted for it but istr was up against other books I also liked very much so I’m not positive about that). Anyway, point is they were all pretty spread out over time and I tended to think of them as a shared universe and didn’t even try to remember continuity or anything. So reading them all at once was fun for that. There’s only 6 years between Firewatch and Blackout in Dunworthy’s timeline!

And now I have opinions about what was really going on with the slippage and so forth and hope there will be another book that proves me right. In short, I think that Polly, Merope and Michael getting trapped in the blitz are more like Carruthers getting trapped in Coventry than Ned and Verity getting shoved around by the net. Also, we don’t see Oxford at all after Dunworthy goes back to pull Polly out, we just see Colin when he is on drops and I am intensely curious what was going on all that time. Was the 8 years Colin mentions 8 years in Oxford or his personal timeline? What did Ishiwaka think was going on? Etc.

That said, I am also pleased Willis isn’t as prolific as some people. Having something like a decade between books is nice for my ability to keep up, if not my ability to remember what happened last time.

I think my favorite Connie Willis is Bellwether.

I love Bellwether a lot. Good stuff.

There was also a shorter piece, The Moon Blues, which I remember enjoying although a lot of the details are a blur at this point.

Blued Moon? I just read that, it’s in the Firewatch collection. Pretty cute

Thanks ... it's been quite a while since I read it, so I wasn't clear on the title.

She also had a collection of Christmas themed stories, one of which was All Seated on the Ground (about aliens). Not terribly communicative aliens, but cleared up in the end.

I don't think I've read all her Christmas stories, and given my fondness for Xmas murder mysteries I might have to get the collection. All Seated on the Ground is in the "Best of " and works well as an audiobook, fwiw.

Today's awesome thrift store find: the complete Dark Is Rising sequence, in the first edition of the Collier paperbacks, for $7.50. If anyone needs me, I will be over here on the sofa hiding from the Orb.

(This store needs to stop having wonderful things for very cheap, as I need another bag for my yarn stash. I can't think of anything to do with a skein of black lace weight mohair/silk, aside from occasionally petting it. For a dollar, it's more than earned its spot.)